Consumers don’t consider netbooks as laptop replacements

If you’re willing to sacrifice a bit of computing power for portability, I’m pretty sure you’re looking at netbooks like the Asus Eee PC as a replacement for your aging laptop. Now I’m wondering if you were able to get the netbook, or if you went ahead and got the full-featured laptop instead. You see, according to a survey by PriceGrabber.com, 55% of consumers think netbooks complements traditional laptops rather than replacing them.

According to Liliputing:

It’s not particularly surprising that most people would rather use a full time laptop for some or many tasks than one that was designed to be low cost and ultraportable. What’s a bit more surprising to me is the implication that 45% of consumers do think that netbooks are replacements for traditional laptops — indicating that many people just don’t need a big screen or a powerful processor to meet most of their computing needs.

The PriceGrabber study defined netbooks as machines with screens smaller than 11 inches and price tags lower than $500, which seems about right to me.

The survey also points out something that’s been pretty clear for the last year or two: The increasing demand for cheap netbooks has led to a drop in the overall prices for computers. PriceGrabber.com reports that the average cost of a laptop in its directory dropped from $808 in December 2008 to $645 in December, 2009.

What do you guys think? Did you replace your laptop with a netbook or did you purchase a netbook so you can be even more portable?